The invention relates to a device with which ply material such as paper, film or the like can be processed, transported and/or divided. The ply material is flexible and may have a weight per surface unit of less than 500, 200 or 100 g/M.sup.2, suitable for example as packaging material, with which a package, such as a stack of paper may be tightly wrapped. Processing may be done by cutting, perforating, crimping, embossing or the like by which the cross-section of the material is altered in the processing region.
It is especially important in the production of rectangular or similar package sheets that the material is drawn as a web from a storage device, such as a reel, and continuously fed to one or more slitters which sever on one or both longitudinal sides of the web an edge strip from the web so as to define the desired width of the package sheet. After slitting, the web is divided into the separate sheets by cross cuts. After which, the sheets are either stacked or fed directly to a packaging station in which they are folded in sequence about units to be packaged so that each unit is entirely enveloped.
To adapt the sheets to packaging units which have varying widths or to place a slit in varying width zones of the material, at least one length slitter is transversely adjustable and then lockable in a working position. This requirement applies also to every other straight-line processing actions in which the working width is substantially smaller than half or a tenth of the material width.
With current devices before a transverse adjustment can be made, the cutting tool is disengaged from the material and then adjusted before being returned into engagement with the material. Thus, after a transverse adjustment has been made, the two lines created by the tool which are transversely offset from each other are not continuously connected to each other because a corresponding transverse processing action has not occurred. In the case of a cutting action, the leading end of one slit and a trailing end of the other slit are then not connected to each other via a continuous connecting cut. As a result, the two sections of the edge strip adjoining each other remain joined to the remaining material end and need to be severed to allow the edge strip to be swept away as a waste strip from the remaining material. In addition, to make the transverse adjustment, the conveying movement of the material web needs to be interrupted. This creates long stoppages in processing of the material.